Topic: Does anyone even play on Dynaverse anymore?

[RogueJedi]

Admitedly, the last few times I've logged in it has been late at night, but I have seen a grand total of 3 other people on The Forge... Is the community still playing on Dyna, or is all just meaningless g-spy matches now?

[Bonk]

We're just in between servers at the moment. (*cough* S'Cipio's late *cough*) The Forge never sees a big crowd, just a steady flow. It is intended to be a persistent server, a good place for new people to start out or returning vets to get their feet wet again. Many players will not play on it for some unknown reason, I suspect because there is no disengagement rule.    Servers other than The Forge or Strayy's still see crowds of up to twenty, especially if the "only dreadnaughts can fly on the front rule" is in place and of a long duration. (please excuse my disengagement rule soapboxing, its my pet peeve...)

People still play, even though the popularity of Mazeppa's retirement thread would have you believe otherwise.

[RogueJedi]

I vaguely remember someting about the disengagement rule...but I'm a bit hazy on that one. What's this "only dreadnaughts can fly on the front" rule?

[KAT Chuut-Ritt]

I vaguely remember someting about the disengagement rule...but I'm a bit hazy on that one. What's this "only dreadnaughts can fly on the front" rule?

 

Nah Dreadnaughts have been largely banned or restricted so its only BCHs now, except on campaigns where they have been banned or limited as well. 

[Bonk]

I vaguely remember someting about the disengagement rule...but I'm a bit hazy on that one. What's this "only dreadnaughts can fly on the front" rule?

That's just me being facetious, its the same rule.

Once we have stabilisied the serverkit on MySQL I'll return to implementing PvP DV shifts so that admins have the option of skipping the disengagment rule. I almost have it working but need to separate it from the basic stability tests for now.

[Julin Eurthyr]

Quickie (and possibly slanted) history for RJ...

The whole mess started when "Plasma Players" complained about needing 30 minutes to run an anti-AI mission, while a droner would sneak in underneath and run 5 missions to the Plasma's 1.  If the plasma boat cought the droner, the death was "meaningless" as about 5k PP later, the droner would be back...

The "disenagement" rule was written to correct this.  In all it's various forms, it banishes the "loser" of a match from the hex for various amounts of time, typically around 1/2 hour if you're blown out of the hex, 1 hour if you run (disengage) from the combat.

Since the D2 VC system around this point encouraged "trench warfare", almost all the main PvP going on was typically in a 1-2 hex region.  Players started bringing in the biggest ship they could get their hands on (DNs), to blast the opponent PvP ships out of the area and allow their hex-flipper comrades free reign.

The old arms race began, and everyone found they were either in a DN (to fight the other DNs), or being constantly blasted from the front.  This led to more and more "DNs suck (cause I can't afford them)" posts, and things like the order of battle systems were implemented to cut back on this syndrome.  Obviously, the now-limited DNs were typically given to the best and brightest pilots (can't afford to lose that one DN for the server now), and they were forced to wing up with escorts after the first couple of solo-DN pilot deaths.

Thusly, we've arrived in the state we are in now...  People winging up to protect (or destroy) these vaunted assets, trying to take the key hex of the hour, and if you're not contributing to the cause, getting jumped by the "high command"...

[Hexx]

<sigh> Actually Julin's close.. but it went more like..

- Players discovered that droners, especially frigate classes (mainly the Kzin Df, but also F5D,E4D, and whatver the Fed is)
  drew very light AI, and could often run missions against said AI in the  1 -2 minute range, usually the mission took as long as it took to
  get within tractor range of the enemy AI

- This of course drew huge complaints from other races who couldn't even come close to running the same mission times. PVP against
   these ships was meaningless as it wasn't 5k pp to replace the flipper, it was about 800. Therefore the plasma boats flyers felt somewhat useless
   They couldn't flip hexes fast enough to compete, and if tey did win a PVP match the flipper was back in business minutes later.

- So we came up with the disengagement rule, if you lost PVP or ran away you were out of a hex for X amount of time. It worked.- for a time-
  However to keep from going insane , most admine only had a few VP hexes on the board. Therefore it became necesarry to control these hexes to win the server
  People started trying to bring the biggest ships they could to a fight. (ie the DN's)

- Now we had also brought inDN restrictions, and people were afraid to lose them (why I'm not sure- ) so they started to only be used fleeted up.

- This is where the real problems started- (feel fre to disagree ,but I'm right). Players started to move away from Fleets of one race
  (which had been the most common until now) and started to assemble fleets combining hte best 3 ships they could from all the races on their side.
  ie Where before you might have had a Fed DNH, with a Fed CB and a NCD, you now had a Fed DNH escorted by some Gorn tender carrying PF's and a Gorn /Fed Fast
  cruiser to run down and tractor other players. And of course the same thing on the coalition side.
  Fleets are now generally based around whatever is the best plasma carrier/DNH unit you can assemble from 3-4 races.
  Of course this means that across the three ships you've pretty much removed whatever weakness a racial fleet may have had.


Anyway -solution for the above? Easy
1) (and eagerly waiting for) Bonk's DV shifts for PVP .
2) (Admin thing) maps with far more VC hexes than they have now, with differing VP values. So you can have a strategy of using the big fleet to
hold a few key hexes, but your opponent can also hit a greater number of smaller VP hexes to counterbalance.
3) Racial fleets- only ships from the same race may fly together, if different races do fly together the Heavy metal would have to be the same race as one of the escorts
    the "other" racial ship woul have to be a line ship.
4) Find someone with the time and inclination to run a server
5) Fins us some more players 
 

[FPF-DieHard]

What Hexx said.

Hexx, did anybody try to paint you green on last friday?   Just curious . . .

[RogueJedi]

Yeah, ok. I remember a lot of the stuff about the disengagement rule came up before I faded away back in 2003. At the time, I liked the idea of forcing DNs into extreme rarity and granting them to certain players (like race leaders) and them having to make sure they are protected in a mission. Then I got stuck as a race leader in some campaign or other (maybe it was a Rook's Tavern server?) and was stuck in an ISC DN for the duration... I would have welcomed an allied droner of some sort.